Next month, Colorado Springs will host an exhibit of artwork by some of the country’s top female muralists, and one of them is Westminster’s Grow Love.
“So right now I am a part of an exhibition with two other artists at the Galleries of Contemporary Art at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs,” she said. “The exhibition is called “Justice of the Piece: Resistance in Unity in Street Art.” And the two other artists that I am showing with are Lady Pink and Sydney G. James. So it's a really neat collaboration of people that they put together because of what and where and how we've each evolved as artists.”
Organizers say the collaboration “brings together the bold, urgent voices of three transformative artists … whose work navigates the intersections of resistance, reclamation, and collective healing through public murals and studio practice.”
Grow Love, 40, whose real name is Robyn Frances, is the only local artist in the show. Lady Pink, is an Ecuador-born muralist based near New York City who has been making murals and painting since the 1980s. Her work has been seen in well-known spaces including the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, and she’s collaborated with fashion brands including Louis Vuitton,.
The third artist is Sydney G. James, a muralist based in Detroit whose work includes murals with visible brushstrokes shown around her city, often with close-ups of the faces of Black people as her subjects. She got a bachelor of fine arts degree from Detroit’s College for Creative Studies and won a Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship in 2017.
Floral bouquets are often represented in Grow Love’s work, which is a part of her world view.
“Grow Love is what I sign my artwork, but it's also my prayer,” said the artist, who grew up in Golden and now lives in Westminster. “It's also my hope for the world. And so weaving that into the storytelling that I do through my murals and through my art is a really important element of my work and my life story.”
She found a way to circumvent recreating the meticulously detailed petals in the flowers, she said. “The murals are composed of florals that I put together digitally. So I collage these bouquets, and the bouquets are really weaving stories through flowers. So they're typically a dedication to the space in the community that I am doing those murals in, oftentimes involving endangered or threatened or imperiled species of plants and flowers.”
In addition to the show, there will be an arts market at which local and regional creatives can sell their work for free. The deadline to apply to sell at the market is today.
